Includes: Taylor, C.H.J. Deed of Trust Document Signed as District of Columbia Recorder of Deeds. Washington, D.C., July 20, 1896. 3pp., signed by Taylor on docketing panel on verso. * J.W. Lyons. Check Signed. Riggs National Bank, Washington, D.C., July 30, 1907. Together 2 items.

Autographs of two more of the 19th century “Black Elite” - politically-prominent African-Americans who, after Frederick Douglass had paved the way, received presidential appointments to federal office. Taylor (1857-1898), a publisher-editor of Black newspapers in Kansas, and later an Atlanta lawyer, was unusual among Black politicians in being loyal to the Democratic Party. He was briefly Grover Cleveland’s envoy to Liberia, then became District of Columbia Recorder of Deeds during Cleveland’s second term, succeeding Douglass, James Monroe Trotter and Blanche K. Bruce in that position. In 1904, after Theodore Roosevelt “shockingly” invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, a racist Congressman charged that this was not a Negro “first” as Cleveland had once had Taylor as a White House lunch guest (which the ex-President hotly denied). Another Georgia lawyer, Judson Whitlocke Lyons (1860-1924), served as Register of the US Treasury under Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, making him the second African-American, after Blanche Bruce, whose signature appeared on US currency notes.